


Innumerable

by cofax



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-09-30
Updated: 1999-09-30
Packaged: 2017-10-07 15:16:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cofax/pseuds/cofax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>How can we mourn the dead or find them justice, when we don't even know how many there are?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Innumerable

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place in a slightly alternate universe, where Mulder didn't spend the summer of 1999 in an double-breasted white coat.

_The smell had been everywhere. Even after hot showers, lemon shampoo, and clean clothes, the odor of decomposition had clung to them all. She still smelled it now, a week later and ten thousand miles away. Putting on her tallest heels that morning, she flashed on the image of a bloodstained Nike, child-sized, lying in the mud._

 

+=+=+

 

Friday July 23, 1999   
11:53 p.m.

Mulder met the team at Dulles. He lounged against a chair in the waiting area across the hall as the team milled about at the gate. It was close to midnight, and even the normally-crowded International Arrivals terminal at Dulles was still, the bars, duty-free shops, and yogurt stands closed for the night. Most of the other passengers on the flight had moved blearily down the hallway towards the baggage carousels, leaving Mulder a clear view of the ICTIU as they made their farewells.

The dozen or so members of the team stood in a close group, talking softly, as if reluctant to break apart. Mulder spotted the copper head of his partner, partly hidden behind the shoulder of a tall blonde woman who looked vaguely familiar. As he waited, he ticked over faces in his mind, until he identified the blonde as a physical anthropologist with the Corps of Engineers whom they had consulted once or twice in the past few years. Other familiar faces were a pathologist from Seattle who had assisted Scully on a few cases in the Northwest, and a Park Service archaeologist whose monograph on Southwestern urn burials was buried under a tottering stack of files in Mulder's office.

Scully looked . . . worn, he realized. They all did. If you looked only at their clothes, you would think the team had just returned from an extended backpacking trip, with their Gore-tex jackets, hiking boots, and jeans. But Scully was wearing her FBI windbreaker, and there was nothing relaxed about the faces disembarking from this late flight from Frankfurt. They'd only been gone for three weeks, but some looked as though they had missed sleep for months. Even from twenty yards away, Mulder could see the ghosts in their eyes.

Eventually Scully gave the anthropologist a quick hug, shook the hands of a few of the other team members, and shouldered her pack. Mulder straightened up as Scully turned around, and she spotted him immediately. With a last word to the anthropologist, Scully came to meet him. She smiled at him, but softly, clearly too weary to put much effort into it.

"Hey, Scully," he said, and took her pack from her. It was a symptom of her exhaustion, he thought, that she did not resist, but let it go with a sigh.

 

"Hey," she responded. "Thanks for meeting me, Mulder. I just don't have the energy to deal with Mom right now, or even a cabbie."

"No thanks necessary. I've got a karmic debt to you, Scully. Every time I think I'm getting into the black, I do something stupid and you pull my nuts out of the fire again. Picking you up from the airport is small potatoes." Mulder touched her lightly on the arm and cocked his head down the empty passageway. "Car's on Level 2."

She gave a soft chuff of laughter and shook her head.

"Don't keep tabs, Mulder -- we would need a mainframe computer to keep it all straight."

"What, we misplace our cars that often?"

+=+=+

Subject: Mulder It's Me   
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 19:01:54   
From: JFButler@FirstInf.mil.ca  
To: FWMulder@fbi.gov

 

M- I managed to get email access from one of boys in blue hats - this guy gave me an hour in exchange for a course of doxycycline. (Don't go there, Mulder. I can still hurt you from here - one message to Frohike and you're without cable for the next month.)

 

We've only been here for about 24 hours, and we haven't been out to any of the sites yet. Still settling in and putting together the labs. We're based in a battered schoolhouse on the outskirts of town. The labs are in the gymnasium, and we're camping in the classrooms. It's unsettling to be doing this work amongst the artwork and tiny desks of third-graders.

The staff here is pretty good - we've got a lot of international support, but our team is mostly Americans. Two other FBI pathologists are here - remember Pete Dillon in San Francisco? Also, there's a new guy from the Denver office, Jeff Childs. The others are state and county coroner's staff from around the country, some Army staff, and a number of archaeologists. They seem like good people, but we all feel pretty out of our depth here. This country was a war zone not six weeks ago, and it looks like it.

The trip was bad - Dulles to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Milan, then military planes, trains, and automobiles. Even that godawful flight from Dallas to DC last summer was better than this - although it's a hell of a lot easier to sleep in an airport when I'm not wearing a double-breasted suit and three-inch heels. (I'm remembering that for the next unofficial investigation you drag me on.)

One thing the news doesn't tell you back home: this country is beautiful. Where we are, it looks like West Virginia. Steep mountain valleys, rich farmland, rugged countryside. But you can't go walking -- there are too many mines. Even though we're not here as doctors, we've already treated four people (3 farmers and a 7-year-old boy) for injuries from landmines. How can people do this to one another? No, don't answer that Mulder - it was rhetorical and you know it.

I have to go - there is limited power and they want to turn down the lights. Don't respond to this message, as I probably won't be able to use this address again. I'll try to write again in a few days. Please tell Mom I'm ok.

 

-S

+=+=+

 

Saturday July 24, 1999   
1:11 a.m.

 

She was so quiet on the ride to Georgetown that Mulder kept checking to see if she was asleep. She wasn't sleeping, but she kept her face turned to the window, watching the dark scenery and suburban lights whip by the car. Or perhaps she wasn't seeing the Virginia countryside at all, Mulder thought, but another landscape altogether, a far darker one.

They were halfway home before he spoke, knowing that this might not be the right time.

"Scully?"

Keeping her head against the window, she twisted sideways to peer at him from her left eye. In the darkened car her eye was colorless and dim. "Yeah?"

"Do you want to talk about it?" He shot her a careful glance, keeping his voice level, neutral, unpresuming.

Her eye closed, and her head swiveled back to the right. "No."

He nodded, and said nothing more. *Not yet.*

When they pulled up in front of her apartment building, she got out of the car slowly, staggering a bit as she straightened. When Mulder heaved her backpack from the trunk, however, she took it from him before he could sling it over his shoulder.

"Thanks, Mulder. I'll see you at work on Monday, ok?" She turned away, already fishing for her keys in the pocket of her coat.

"Scully---" He stepped after her, but she turned to face him, her gaze staying at the level of his chest.

"I'll be fine, Mulder. I'm just tired. Go home. And -- thanks for the ride." Scully raised her eyes to meet his for a fleeting second, and he was ashamed to realize that she was asking him for some space; she was utterly drained. She also hadn't said "I'm fine" -- she'd said "I'll *be* fine." For Scully, he thought, that was admitting she was close to complete collapse.

He nodded. "Ok, Scully. Get some rest." As he shut the trunk of the car, she stepped forward and gave him an awkward hug, unbalanced by the backpack on her shoulder. He squeezed her shoulders gently. "Welcome home, Scully." She felt like she was made of baling wire and balsa wood, barely holding together even in the soft Virginia night.

With a thin smile, she pulled her keys out of her pocket and headed for her door.

Mulder didn't start the car until he saw the light in her bedroom window go out.

+=+=+

Subject: Mulder It's Me  
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 1999 22:21:32  
From: PLAmundson@ThirdInf.mil.ca  
To: FWMulder@fbi.gov

M-

I don't have a lot of time - we're really busy.

It's . . . really difficult, Mulder. What we are doing is SO important, but God, it's hard. What was done here was unspeakable, Mulder, on a level even I have a hard time comprehending. You and I have seen some terrible things, people treated like merchandise, people killed, manipulated, mutilated for the most petty or inhuman reasons. But this -- oh, I can't describe it. It's orders of magnitude worse, somehow, because it is so human.

Does that make any sense? I'm not very rational right now - we've been working nonstop for the past week, so I'm sorry if I'm kind of incoherent. I need to sleep, but I need to talk to you too, and this is the only chance I had at an internet connection. (Yes, another soldier with an STD -- stop laughing, Mulder.)

 

Mulder -

there are so many bodies we aren't able to count them accurately. How can we mourn the dead or find them justice, when we don't even know how many there are?

I have to go-

S

+=+=+

Monday July 26, 1999   
9:28 a.m.

Skinner's assistant Kimberly gave Mulder a professional smile as he entered the anteroom to Skinner's office, files in hand, with an uneasy awareness of his solitary step. Scully had not appeared in the basement office for their usual coffee and strategy session before Skinner's staff meeting. Before taking the elevator to the fifth floor, Mulder had called her cell phone, but it was apparently turned off. She'd probably just forgotten to recharge the batteries after being out of the country for three weeks. Probably.

But Scully rarely forgot the little details that kept her life in smooth operation: she never drove around for weeks with a bag full of clothes to be dry-cleaned, she didn't rack up overdue charges on videos or library books, and her refrigerator didn't contain anything resembling a fourth-grade science project. If her cell phone was off, it was on purpose. Mulder gave Kimberly half a smile, all he could summon up on a Monday morning, and entered Skinner's office.

As A.D. Skinner took a last sip of his coffee before opening the meeting, the door opened to allow Scully to slip inside. She looked better than she had on Friday, Mulder decided, but she wasn't all the way back yet. She took her usual spot next to Mulder, and nodded neutrally at the other agents around the table. Given the inordinately small size of the X-Files Unit, it made no sense to have only the nominal supervisor attend the Monday meetings, and Skinner had long since requested Scully's full participation. It made sense to Mulder -- saved him the trouble of repeating for Scully everything that had been said in the meeting.

Skinner was an efficient manager with small patience for bureaucratic delays; he moved the meeting along briskly, and it was only 9:55 when he closed the folder in front of him. He started to rise, then paused, with what Mulder recognized as a meaningful glance at Scully at the end of the table. "One last note before we break. The Attorney General called me this morning. She wanted to pass along the personal thanks of the special prosecutor in The Hague for the FBI's support of her war crimes investigations. In particular, the A.G. singled out Special Agent Dana Scully for, and I quote, 'her professionalism, integrity, and compassion under extremely difficult conditions. She has done the Bureau proud.' "

As soon as Skinner began to speak, Mulder saw Scully go still. She had been unwontedly silent during the meeting, and he had been eyeing her cautiously for most of it. When Skinner began to quote the A.G., Scully's right hand seized on the pen in her lap, and began to bend it.

Skinner looked at the agents gathered around the table. "I would like to state for the record that such behavior is no more than I would have expected from Agent Scully. I am honored -- we should all be honored -- by her commitment to everything the Bureau stands for."

Mulder barely heard him; he was watching the pen in Scully's hand warp into right angles, and begin to leak. People who thought Scully was weak because she was a woman in a size four trenchcoat clearly had no idea what cracking open a ribcage did for the muscles in the hands and arms. Scully was staring blindly down the table at Skinner, her face carefully composed, her eyes blank. "Thank you, sir," she said. Her voice did not tremble, but Mulder saw the pen snap. Moving carefully, Mulder slipped his hand under Scully's, and gently disengaged the pen from her contorted fingers. He wrapped it in his handkerchief just before it would have ruined Scully's favorite dark green suit.

"Agent Scully," Skinner said. "Do you think you could brief us on your experiences with the ICT Investigative Unit?"

If it were possible to do so, Mulder thought, Scully would have paled even further. He decided it was time to shift the spotlight. "Sir, Agent Scully is still working on her report; you should have it by the end of the week." Scully kept her eyes on Skinner, but Mulder felt the tension in her shoulders relax just a notch.

The light from the south-facing windows reflected off Skinner's glasses, obscuring his eyes. "Not a formal briefing, Agent Scully, just a lunchtime meeting with some of your colleagues. Anecdotes, your personal experiences and observations. How's next week -- say, Thursday?"

After that, what was there to say? Except to point out that Scully's "anecdotes" were unlikely to be appropriate for a lunchtime meeting, concerning as they did the dozens of decomposing bodies found in mass graves scattered across a war-torn countryside. The odor of public relations clung to this briefing, and Mulder didn't like it at all.

Scully shrugged off Mulder's touch on her arm as they left Skinner's office. Her face was calm and pale, and to the ordinary observer she appeared slightly bored, her right hand swinging a file folder lightly as she strode down the hall. But Mulder inventoried the marks of tension in her face, the tiny line between her brows, the extra makeup covering the evidence of a sleepless night. Her lips were chapped even beneath her carefully-applied lipstick. She was not happy, and not fine.

+=+=+

Subject: Mulder It's Me  
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1999 12:11:05  
From: JFButler@FirstInf.mil.ca  
To: FWMulder@fbi.gov

M- I'm landing at Dulles on a flight from Frankfurt around midnight on Friday - Lufthansa, I think. That's what they tell us, anyway. I'll call you if our plans change. Don't make Mom come get me? I hope you get this message, but if you don't I'll just take a cab from the airport.

We're leaving tomorrow. We have to present our findings and evidence to the prosecutor at The Hague on Wednesday afternoon. I think we did what we came here for - we built a chain of evidence they can use to hang these . . . these men.

"Men". That's not a word I'm willing to use for the people who did this to their own country, but I've seen them. They're not monsters, not genetic mutants or even twisted psychopaths. They are human beings like you and me, like Skinner and Frohike and poor doomed Spender, and the things they have done make me want to cut out my humanity with a scalpel.

I'm so tired. More than tired. Even compassion can only take you so far under these conditions.

I'll see you Friday -

S

+=+=+

Monday July 26, 1999  
4:42 p.m.

Scully spent much of the day catching up on paperwork that had built up while she was gone. Although she had her own office upstairs, the files and the evidence were in the basement, so she used the table she had long since appropriated as her own. She kept her second-best coffee-cup on that table, and a small stash of aspirin, Clif bars, and herbal tea in a file drawer underneath. The office was silent for most of the day, even during lunch, which they both ate at their desks. At least, Mulder thought Scully ate. He didn't have the courage or the opportunity to determine whether the yogurt container in the trash can by the door was actually empty.

By late afternoon, Mulder's patience had run out. He moved up behind her and placed the handkerchief on the center of her blotter. With a delicacy she exhibited even in the morgue, Scully opened the stained cloth to reveal the mangled pen, dried ink crusted along its length.

"Oh." Her head fell forward and she touched the pen with the tip of her finger, moving it off the handkerchief and onto the desk. Her nails were a little ragged, despite the careful clear polish. He couldn't see her face; the curtain of her hair hung between them, but he could see the tension in her body. She breathed deeply several times, a sound Mulder recognized as Scully packing it all down, like a camper forcing a sleeping bag into a stuffsack, so she could keep it contained. So she wouldn't crack.

He didn't want her to crack, didn't want to believe that this assignment had been as bad as Melissa's death, as Donnie Pfaster, as Philip Padgett. As Emily's brief life and death. Didn't want to think about Scully baring her shredded soul to an audience of their Bureau colleagues over tuna sandwiches and stale ginger ale. She had taken so much damage since she came to work with him . . . . But this was not because of him, not because of the X-Files, he reminded himself. Scully's ability and passion for justice would have called her on this job even if she had never heard of Spooky Mulder in the basement.

*This is not about me.*

"Did you get my email?" When she finally spoke, Scully's voice was as controlled as Mulder had ever heard it, with no shading of emotion. She might as well have been reading a cereal box.

This was going to be painful.

*Of course it is - this is the Mulder 'N' Scully show: all pain, all the time. Except when we're bored.*

Mulder stepped around Scully, carefully relocated some files, and seated himself on her desk. Her eyes were still hidden behind her hair, but she had put the pen down on her blotter, where a yellow stripe through the month of July marked her temporary assignment to the International Criminal Tribunal Investigative Unit.

"Yeah, I got your email," he finally responded when he was comfortably settled. *Hell yes, I got your email, Scully, and it nearly drove me mad with frustration. Do you have any idea what it was like to have you open up to me, even that much, and be unable to respond?*

"I don't think I can explain any better than I have, Mulder. It was - - it was appalling."

Mulder kept his eyes on her head, wondering, not for the first time, why he could read vicious serial killers more easily than his own partner.

"Would you like me to ask Skinner to postpone this brown-bag? Or I could come up with some flying-saucer chase to get us out of D.C. next week ---"

"No." She raised her head; her eyes were dry, and clear. She had not wept today. She looked nowhere close to weeping now, but as she did when faced with an uncooperative witness - slightly impatient.

The new silence hanging in the office was not an improvement, Mulder thought, as if her response had changed the tension that was always between them from unacknowledged to merely unseen. He swung his leg uneasily against Scully's desk, jostling her chair with every arc. After three weeks alone, he found it comforting just to feel her weight in the chair.

"Would you go back, Scully, if they asked you?" That wasn't the question he wanted to ask. But he'd testified in court often enough to know better than to ask a question for which he didn't know the answer.

"Yes, I think so. It's such important work, Mulder. I know what we do is important, too -- but it's so *good* to have an impact. So much of what we do is never resolved. We solve the crime but there is no justice -- and no one to speak for the dead and the disappeared." Her voice picked up intonation and emphasis; she put a hand on his foot to stop the swing, and canted sideways to see his eyes.

"But this -- the ICT -- this was solely about procedure, about evidence. They needed concrete proof of the crimes and the criminals, so the killers could be brought to justice. It was the real world, not this shadowy realm of half-truths you and I operate in so often."

"It felt *good*, Mulder. I was fighting in the open for once, a member of a team supported by our governments, fighting for human rights." Her eyes were not shining, her voice was not raised, but she spoke with a idealistic fervency Mulder had not heard since the early days of their partnership, before their world went to hell and her convictions crumbled into ashes like the ones they still found in the corners of the basement.

He hadn't realized how much that sense of closure meant to her. And although he didn't want to argue with her, he wanted to say, "What about the dead in that pit in Perkey, and the women of Allentown, and all the lost children, Scully? *We* speak for them, Scully -- we are the only ones who will." But that wasn't the right question, either. This wasn't about what anyone else needed -- it was about what *Scully* needed.

Mulder's foot dropped suddenly away as Scully pushed her chair from her desk, rose to turn away from him. She crossed the office to the filing cabinets, fingered the folders stacked on top, awaiting their turn to be entered into Mulder-order.

The office was cleaner than it had been before the fire. Under the previous tenants the office had had a complacently professional ambiance, exhibited by self-congratulatory photos and plaques. Now it was still neater than last year, but Mulder was slowly decorating it with souvenirs of cases, fuzzy photographs of strange phenomena, and the occasional cover story from "Weekly World News" to leaven the mix.

Scully fiddled with a tiny plastic UFO he'd left on his desk, then put it down, looking up at the high windows where the late afternoon light trickled in. She spoke quietly, her voice softer than it had been a moment ago. "It was nice to be in the sunlight, Mulder. Just for a little while." He closed his eyes.

After a moment, Mulder opened his eyes into the shadows at the rear of the office; if he watched her, he wouldn't be able to ask the question he had to ask. "Do you want to leave? Work for one of those human rights organizations?"

She didn't answer right away. The silence grew again, crept out of the corners to circle him like desert creatures, waiting for the corpse to realize its mortality. He looked back at her; Scully leaned against his desk, still facing the windows. With an idle hand, she flipped open the file Mulder had been working on all afternoon, a consult for VCS. The photographs on the top splayed out across the desktop, a hand dealt by death. He saw her breath stop.

Her same hand, not so idle now, lifted to one of the photos. Mulder saw Scully run one clean fingernail in a careful line across the glossy surface, and from across the room he knew what she saw. She traced the line the knife had made across the abdomen of a twelve- year-old girl, sprawled nude, and newly dead, on a picnic table in a National Forest campground north of Boise. With a sudden shift of weight, Scully sagged against her palms, bracing herself against the edge of Mulder's desk. Her head hung forward, her hair again swinging forward into her face.

Mulder heard a soft and painful laugh, falling with dusty unexpectedness into the still air of the basement. "Oh, Mulder," Scully said, her voice catching. "What are we doing if not human rights work?"

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by a report on NPR regarding the FBI's participation in the war crimes investigation in Kosovo. Scully, as one of the Bureau's pathologists, would be an appropriate candidate to participate in one of these international teams.
> 
> As ever, my most profound thanks to my beta Maria Nicole, who is far too generous with her time. Any problems with this story are to be laid at my door, not hers.


End file.
